Search results for "forest"

Comparing the Climatic and Landscape Risk Factors for Lyme Disease Cases in the Upper Midwest and Northeast United States

2020

Lyme disease, recognized as one of the most important vector-borne diseases worldwide, has been increasing in incidence and spatial extend in United States. In the Northeast and Upper Midwest, Lyme disease is transmitted by Ixodes scapularis. Currently, many studies have been conducted to identify factors influencing Lyme disease risk in the Northeast, however, relatively few studies focused on the Upper Midwest. In this study, we explored and compared the climatic and landscape factors that shape the spatial patterns of human Lyme cases in these two regions, using the generalized linear mixed models. Our results showed that climatic variables generally had opposite correlations with Lyme d…

Comparative analysis of surface energy balance models for actual evapotranspiration estimation through remotely sensed images

2012

CARATTERIZZAZIONE MULTISCALA DEL SISTEMA SPA PER LA MODELLAZIONE IDROLOGICA DEI CONSUMI EVAPOTRASPIRATIVI EFFETTIVI

L’incremento demografico mondiale degli ultimi decenni ha determinato una crescente richiesta di risorse idriche sia per usi civili ed industriali, che per l’agricoltura. Si stima, infatti, che nel 2030 il progressivo aumento della domanda di risorse idriche determinerà la difficoltà di accesso per circa metà della popolazione del pianeta (WWAP, 2012), soprattutto nelle regioni caratterizzate da climi aridi o semiaridi. I problemi connessi alla carenza di risorse idriche sono particolarmente rilevanti in agricoltura che, a scala globale, utilizza attualmente il 70% dell’intero utilizzo delle acqua proveniente dai corpi idrici superficiali e sotterranei (WWAP, 2014). L’uso finale di tali ris…

Statistical check of USLE-M and USLE-MM to predict bare plot soil loss in two Italian environments

2018

The USLE-M and the USLE-MM estimate event plot soil loss. In both models, the erosivity term is given by the runoff coefficient, QR, times the single-storm erosion index, EI30. In the USLE-MM, QREI30is raised to an exponent b1> 1 whereas b1= 1 is assumed in the USLE-M. Simple linear regression analysis can be applied to parameterize both models, but logarithmically transformed data have to be used for USLE-MM. Parameterizing the USLE-MM with nonlinear regression of untransformed data could be a more appropriate procedure. A statistical check of the two suggested models (USLE-M and USLE-MM), considering two alternative parameterization procedures for the USLE-MM, was carried out for the Mass…

Indici di erosività per la stima della perdita di suolo a scala di evento

2009

Balanced Large Scale Knowledge Matching Using LSH Forest

2015

Evolving Knowledge Ecosystems were proposed recently to approach the Big Data challenge, following the hypothesis that knowledge evolves in a way similar to biological systems. Therefore, the inner working of the knowledge ecosystem can be spotted from natural evolution. An evolving knowledge ecosystem consists of Knowledge Organisms, which form a representation of the knowledge, and the environment in which they reside. The environment consists of contexts, which are composed of so-called knowledge tokens. These tokens are ontological fragments extracted from information tokens, in turn, which originate from the streams of information flowing into the ecosystem. In this article we investig…

Measuring and Modelling Evaporation Losses from Wet Branches of Lemon Trees

2022

Evaporation losses of rainfall intercepted by canopies depend on many factors, including the temporal scale of observations. At the event scale, interception is a few millimetres, whereas at a larger temporal scale, the number of times that a canopy is filled by rainfall and then depleted can make the interception an important fraction of the rainfall depth. Recently, a simplified interception/evaporation model has been proposed, which considers a modified Merrian model to compute interception during wet spells and a simple power-law equation to model evaporation from wet canopy during dry spells. Modelling evaporation process at the sub hourly temporal scale required the two parameters of …

Comparison of feature importance measures as explanations for classification models

2021

AbstractExplainable artificial intelligence is an emerging research direction helping the user or developer of machine learning models understand why models behave the way they do. The most popular explanation technique is feature importance. However, there are several different approaches how feature importances are being measured, most notably global and local. In this study we compare different feature importance measures using both linear (logistic regression with L1 penalization) and non-linear (random forest) methods and local interpretable model-agnostic explanations on top of them. These methods are applied to two datasets from the medical domain, the openly available breast cancer …

A comparison between the single ring pressure infiltrometer and simplified falling head techniques

2013

Testing the relative performances of the single ring pressure infiltrometer (PI) and simplified falling head (SFH) techniques to determine the field saturated soil hydraulic conductivity, Kfs, at the near point scale may help to better establish the usability of these techniques for interpreting and simulating hydrological processes. A sampling of 10 Sicilian sites showed that the measured Kfs was generally higher with the SFH technique than the PI one, with statistically significant differences by a factor varying from 3 to 192, depending on the site. A short experiment with the SFH technique yielded higher Kfs values because a longer experiment with the PI probably promoted short-term swe…

Revisiting the Solid Flux Theory

2022

Several variations of the basic activated sludge process and of the related design procedures for final clarifiers have been developed, which are frequently based on the well-known solid flux theory (SFT). In this paper, by using the Lambert W function and a “virtual” solid flux corresponding to the Vesilind parameters’ ratio, the SFT is reformulated, and dimensionless groups are detected, which highly reduce the number of parameters that are involved in the final clarifiers’ design procedure. The derived dimensionless relationships and the corresponding plots have general validity since they can be applied to all the possible design/verification parameter combinatio…